Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Police officers and lawyers, public entities promised to “erase fines” in exchange for money – the Public.en

it Was a fraud that involved a wide network of lawyers, officers of the traffic division of the PSP, and the staff and lawyers of the National Authority for Road Safety (ANSR), the Institute for Mobility of Transport (IMT), Municipal Police and of the Automobile Club of Portugal (ACP): dedicated to identify drivers autuados by the practice of the administrative offences and road and it was proposed to make decisions that were favourable to the autuados and delete the record of fines in the National Register of Drivers, that is, the registration road. In some cases, promised to the second way of driving licences. All in exchange for money. And all in illegal way.

The scheme worked since 2015 and since there is a year and a half that was being investigated by the PSP. In the execution of the search ordered by the Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DIAP) in Lisbon, that police arrested this morning three persons, two of which are targeted by arrest warrants and a third individual indicted for the crime of holding gun prohibited. One of the detainees in this operation exercised the functions of administrative offences road of the Traffic Division of the own PSP, has made the office of the Attorney General District of Lisbon in a note issued this morning.

active and passive Corruption, illegitimate access, falsehood computing, patronage, denial of justice and malfeasance are crimes in a cause which justified the search of this morning that targeted the ANSR, the IMT, the Municipal Police and the facilities of the own PSP, most specifically the traffic division, in Rua José Estevão.

The approximately 170 elements of the PSP, aided by the Unit of Telecommunications and Informatics of the PJ and accompanied by the magistrates of the 9.Th Section of the DIAP of Lisbon, did even search the homes and vehicles of officials involved in this fraud and a law firm, a total of 31 warrants.

The National Authority for Road Safety (ANSR) has secured this morning to the PUBLIC, while playing out the search, in the building up of this body, in the Tagus Park in Oeiras, that the ANSR is “to provide all the support and availability to the authorities”, as said the adviser of this body, Peter Silva. The building of the Institute of Mobility and Transport, in Avenida Elias Garcia, has been closed and most of the staff was sent home, being that, at the beginning of the afternoon, the searches were still ongoing.

However, the president of the Automobile Club of Portugal, Carlos Barbosa, deny peremptorily, the involvement of the organization he directs in this process. "The ACP has nothing to do with traffic fines. We are even prohibited by the Order of Lawyers – the evil, as for me – well as supporting our members in court in this matter," he says, adding that it could not any information with the Department of Investigation and Penal Action. "The chief of the litigation of the ACP called there and they told him that as the case was in secret of justice they could not gain more than what it had disclosed in a press release," laments Carlos Barbosa.

as Far as the PUBLIC found, none of the organizations or entities mentioned are targeted in the investigation, but several employees that they were working and that were integrated into this network. Is the rest this is what explains the Chamber of Lisbon, when he says that the city Police is not to be investigated in the framework of this operation: “The only connection of the Municipal Police of this case has to do with the fact that two elements newly-integrated (for about a week) in the service of the municipality are from the Traffic Division of the PSP, and they are to be the target of the search warrants issued in the framework of this research, DIAP, for alleged illegal acts committed in the exercise of functions in that division,” a police officer.